Brooklyn Could Have Been A Contender

By John Tierney

Published: December 28, 1997

It is a little late to be running a correction, but The New York Times owes one to the people who gathered at Brooklyn's City Hall on New Year's Eve 100 years ago. They met on that miserably cold, rainy night for an ''observance'' -- they specifically refused to call it a celebration -- of their city's merger with New York at midnight. Brooklyn's Mayor got a long round of applause for his efforts to prevent New York City, which then consisted of just Manhattan and the southwestern Bronx, from annexing its neighbors to create the boroughs of Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island. The evening's featured speaker was another leader of the resistance, St. Clair McKelway, the editor of The Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Sharing Manhattan's tax revenues appealed to many Brooklynites (enough, at least, to vote for the merger), but McElway feared his industrious city would be corrupted by marrying for money.

''Brooklyn has repeatedly shown herself to be the most independent urban community in the world,'' McKelway told the somber audience. ''There need be no apology for the poverty of Brooklyn. It is an honorable poverty.''

Across the river, Manhattan's merchants, bankers and publishers celebrated their triumph with fireworks and a parade. The Times could not resist gloating. It ridiculed McKelway's speech in an article pretending to share his concern. ''Complete assimilation,'' The Times warned, ''would rob Brooklyn of

that treasured jewel, her poverty, by which, it appears, she sets such store.'' The Times described the ''peril'' awaiting Brooklyn: thriving new industries, ample tax revenues, less public debt, fine affordable homes for the new workers, improved public utilities, streets that would be ''well paved and clean,'' bustling business and shopping districts. Brooklyn would soon be so ''rich and noisy'' it would rival Manhattan.

McKelway's paper had tried warning Brooklyn's taxpayers that they couldn't afford New York's profligate style of government, but The Times vowed that consolidation would be a blessing to taxpayers in both cities: ''Brooklyn's taxes would fall at once. New York's would not perhaps fall at once, but they would fall certainly.'' Suggesting that The Eagle's opposition to consolidation was motivated by ''selfish reasons'' instead of ''regard for the public welfare,'' The Times reassured the Brooklyn paper that it would go on publishing ''with undiminished profit and honor in the same city with ourselves.''

Today, the latest incarnation of The Brooklyn Daily Eagle -- the original shut down in 1955 -- has a circulation of 20,000, which is approximately 1.7 million less than the circulation of the periodical in your hands. Consolidation has been very good for The New York Times and other Manhattan institutions. The public's welfare is another matter.

Contrary to The Times's prediction, Brooklyn is more of a poor relation today than it was a century ago. While some sections of Manhattan are booming, Brooklyn, with its factories closed and its piers abandoned, has a 10 percent unemployment rate, one of the highest in the country. It is part of a city renowned for decrepit roads and public utilities, high taxes, heavy public debt and a perpetual shortage of affordable housing. In retrospect, consolidation looks an awful lot like what the Brooklynites gathered on New Year's Eve called it: the Great Mistake.

Modern Brooklyn does have some success stories, like the revival of Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope and the new communities of immigrants. Russians have created a thriving Little Odessa in Brighton Beach; Mexican manufacturers have turned empty factories in Bushwick into Tortilla Triangle; other Hispanic, Asian and Caribbean entrepreneurs have reinvigorated neighborhoods and commercial districts. On Flatbush Avenue, Caribbean jitney drivers have created a mass-transit system that is better than the municipal bus lines and actually turns a profit. Large office buildings have recently opened in downtown Brooklyn, the first such development there in half a century -- but that's also the bad news. It shouldn't have taken so long.

Brooklyn today is famous mainly for what it has lost: industries, neighborhoods, a baseball team. As Pete Hamill writes of his fellow Brooklynites, ''An inner voice always seems to whisper: There was another place here once and it was better than this.'' The borough has become a convenient symbol for doom in movies like ''Last Exit to Brooklyn,'' a brutal story of hoods and striking workers in Red Hook's industrial wasteland, and ''Do the Right Thing,'' which ends with a riot by despairing blacks in Bedford-Stuyvesant. In the Bay Ridge of ''Saturday Night Fever,'' the grand ennobling dream is to escape across the river to the City.

New York's consolidation was predicated on the philosophy that bigger was better, that a city would prosper under the centralized guidance of experts -- rule by the ''best men,'' as the consolidationists put it. In the first few decades of consolidation, Greater New York did thrive, partly because centralization produced some legitimate benefits (like simplifying the building of the subway system) but mainly because the city was already established as a hub of wealth and talent. Eventually, though, the best men's plans became too expensive and stifling, not only in New York but in the other cities that emulated its bureaucracies. New York inspired America's golden age of urban planning, which was marred only by the mass exodus of urbanites to suburban communities offering large houses, uncrowded streets -- and smaller governments that were not run by those best men.